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Eels are one of nature's strangest creatures. To this day, we still know very little about it. European eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, an ocean with hard-to-define boundaries, and then travel to the coast of Europe, where they swim into rivers and streams to live. After living peacefully for decades, when the biological clock rings, it will complete its last transformation and embark on a long journey back to its birthplace, where it will reproduce and die. If it cannot start its journey, it seems to wait for eternity and never change. For more than two thousand years, eels have remained a mystery. Aristotle was convinced that it had no gender, and Freud was repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to find its genitals. No one has ever seen eels mating. The mysterious eel fascinates Patrick. Just as elusive as the eel is the complex and subtle relationship between him and his father. He explores the fields of literature, art, religion and the history of science, while reminiscing about his childhood days spent fishing for eels with his father. The eel's unknowability, its clumsy and romantic life journey, are like metaphors, triggering our thinking and understanding of survival and death, purpose and meaning.